The Language of African Literature - Ngugi Wa Thiong’O

Ngugi Wa Thiong’O (Pic:businesstoday.co.ke) 

The Language of African Literature 

Ngugi Wa Thiong’O says that he was born into a large family of a farmer. The community was like an extended family. He spoke his native language Gikuyu. Children listened to stories and retold the same to others. People who could make their stories alive and dramatic by using words and images were good storytellers. They used inflexions and tones effectively. He says that children appreciated the magic of words beyond real meanings. They enriched language with the help of puzzles, riddles and proverbs. Homes and farms were their primary schools.

After the Kenyan emergency in 1952, English became the language of education. Students who spoke the native language were humiliated. English was given the most important place n the apartheid pyramid structure of education. Students who couldn’t get better marks in English were made to fail even though they got distinction in all the other subjects. Proficiency in English ensured prominence in the colonial rule. Orature in native languages was stopped and English literature was encouraged. Language and literature took native Africans away from their nativity.

Kenyan languages were equated with backwardness and underdevelopment. Nguigi wanted to fight the colonial intention of detaching native people with nativity. Kenyan children should not grow up hating the tools of communication developed by their own communities and their history. He switched to writing in his mother-tongue of Gikuyu after seventeen years writing in the Afro-European tradition. He believed that writing in native African languages is a part of the anti-imperialistic struggles. He says that colonial alienation takes natives away from reality by distancing the language of daily use. The system separates mind from body and produces a society of headless bodies and bodyless heads.

Ngugi wants to bring back harmony between all the aspects of language and reunite the Kenyan student to the native environment. He wishes to see Kenyan languages carry their literature, culture and social nature. He says the Kenyan student can learn other languages without having any inferior complexes about their own language only after experiencing the richness of native language.